Employee Spotlight: Helena Marsikova

Each month, we will be featuring a different employee in our Employee Spotlight series. This series was born with the belief that your life experiences make you the unique person you are today and influence what you bring to the amazing culture here at Actian. We have chosen to feature those incredible individuals with a blog post dedicated to them.

For those of you who follow the ActianLife blog, this month’s Employee Spotlight will be a familiar name! This month, I sat down with Helena Marsikova; a frequent ActianLife blogger, our rock star Partner Marketing Manager, and also the kind person who invited me to the PaintNite that inspired my very first post –  Whimsical…lotus?.

Helena was born in the Czech Republic to a family of doctors, but from an early age, she knew she wanted to go in another direction. In 4^th grade, Helena started learning English as a foreign language. As it turns out, she had quite a knack for language, as she also went on to learn German, Spanish and French. In college, at age 17, Helena moved to London to study abroad for 9 months. While there, she learned, explored, and developed into someone she wouldn’t be otherwise. Helena graduated with a Master’s degree in Theory and Philosophy of Communication from the University of West Bohemia.

Following college, Helena landed a job with Kerio Technologies for their internal PR team where she created an internal magazine and hosted employee events. Soon, her amazing work led to an interest from the marketing and sales teams, where she further developed her skills in external marketing. After climbing up the ranks to Senior Marketing Manager, the CEO approached her about relocating to the U.S. for an opportunity as Partner Marketing Director. Having previously been interested in living in the U.S., the opportunity was exciting – but life was different having just purchased their dream home in Prague and having a 2-year-old daughter and a son that had just started 1^st grade. Ultimately, Helena, her husband, and two children decided to relocate for the opportunity. A short year later, the company was acquired. After two more years, the day came when she would leave Kerio – which was bittersweet for her because they had become a second family.

Luckily, Helena found her “third family” the day she joined Actian! In her role at Actian, Helena primarily supports channel marketing – the biggest portion being Actian ZEN partners. Always having a partner mindset, one of her first wins was revamping the Partners section. Recently, Helena was instrumental in building the new Actian Partner Program and launching a brand new Actian Partner Portal, providing partners with all the sales and marketing tools they need. All of her hard work and achievements were recently celebrated at the company’s SKO (Sales Kick Off), where she received an award for Teaming to Win!

Thank you, Helena! We are lucky to be your “third family”.

About Rae Coffman-Bueb

Rae is the Director, Employee Experience at Actian, focusing on bringing the employee experience to the next level. She is committed to developing strategic programs that help employees feel more empowered in their roles. Rae has a background in People Operations, focused on up leveling and implementing best practice and process adoption across global organizations.